web analytics

Category: Individualism

Categories
Antiochus IV Epiphanes Catholic Church Christendom Individualism Inquisition Jerusalem Kevin MacDonald Philosophy of history Racial studies Universalism

Kevin MacDonald’s trilogy

The second book of Kevin MacDonald’s study on Jewry, Separation and its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (1994/2002), the first of his trilogy to be translated to German, is my favorite of MacDonald’s three academic works that I read in more than two years. Professor MacDonald is the foremost scholar on the Jewish question. In Separation and its Discontents (hereafter SAID) he wrote:

Western societies, unlike prototypical Jewish cultures, do not have a primitive concern with racial purity. Rather, concern about racial purity emerges only in the late stages of Jewish-gentile group conflict…

Despite a great deal of commonality among Western anti-Semitic movements, there was a great difference between the universalistic, assimilatory tendencies of traditional Western Christianity and the exclusivistic, racialist program of National Socialism. Indeed, we have seen that beginning in the 19th century an important aspect of German anti-Semitic ideology was a criticism of Western universalism and the development of peculiarly German conceptions of Christianity. A critical component of official National Socialist ideology, as represented in the thought of Alfred Rosenberg, was the idea that “the twin forces of disintegration, namely universalism and individualism, act in perpetual conflict with the Germanic concept of race.” In this regard, National Socialism was indeed profoundly anti-Western. In rejecting both universalism and individualism, National Socialism resembled, much more closely than did medieval Western collectivist Christianity, its mirror image rival, Judaism. [page 196]

In a previous chapter MacDonald had written:

We shall see that with the rise of the National Socialist movement in Germany, the universalist themes of Western Christianity were completely overthrown in favor of a full-blown racialist ideology of the ingroup. In Chapter Five I will argue that National Socialism is a true mirror-image of Judaism. Not surprisingly, it was also the most dangerous enemy that Judaism has confronted in its entire existence. [page 133]

One of the hypothesis advanced in SAID provides food for thought. MacDonald wrote, “I propose that the Christian church in late antiquity was in its very essence the embodiment of a powerful anti-Semitic movement…” (page 112). This is something I had never heard of, and reminds me my first readings of psychohistory and Lloyd deMause’s insights on why the Christ archetype galvanized the population of the ancient world, although MacDonald’s hypothesis is totally distinct and is presented from an altogether distant point of view. But after digesting what both deMause and MacDonald say, for the first time I feel I am starting to comprehend facets of Christianity that would have never occurred to me from a conventional reading to history. If MacDonald is right, the Roman Catholic Church was the earliest attempt toward a type of society that we may call collectivism for European-derived peoples.

Although Christianity always held universalist ideals at its core, it nonetheless fulfilled its role of impeding, as did the Muslim nations, that Judaism became a destructive force for the indigenous culture of the Late Roman Empire and the Early Middle Ages. One of the facts that I learnt in SAID is that most restrictions enacted against Jewry, initiated in the period from Eusebius to Justinian, were still active throughout Christendom until the French Revolution hit the continent with its egalitarian fury. It was precisely the so-called Enlightenment (that presently some Western dissidents are starting to call “the Dark Enlightenment”) what inspired the founding fathers of the United States of America. And contrary to those white nationalists who still insult the memory of Adolf Hitler and the movement he created, I would claim that the mortal sin of the French Revolution, the emancipation of Jewry, was not properly atoned in Europe until the arrival of a specifically racial ideology: National Socialism.

But not only Nazi Germany has been demonized in the public mind. The Inquisition is widely regarded as a black page in the history of the Church even by the most Catholic individuals that I know. In contrast to such view MacDonald presents us with a radical reevaluation of what was precisely the role of the Inquisition. On page 147 he states: “I here develop the view that the Spanish Inquisition was fundamentally an authoritarian, collectivist, and exclusionary movement that resulted from resource and reproductive competition with Jews, and particularly crypto-Jews posing as Christians.” One could even argue that, thanks to the Inquisition, for three-hundred years before the movement of independence that gave birth to Mexico, New Spain (1521-1821) was Judenfrei.

While reading SAID I could not escape the thought that whites are un-insightful because, unlike the Jews and with the exception of William Pierce and Arthur Kemp (see the long chapters in this book quoting them), very few have knowledge of the history of their race. If we take into account that, in one of their holydays, New York Hassidic Jews celebrate their victory over the ancient Greeks who tried to assimilate them millennia ago, a basic question comes to mind: Why don’t we celebrate the victory of Antiochus IV over the Jews, or Titus’ conquest of Jerusalem?

Bust of Antiochus IV

We do not celebrate these victories precisely for the reason that both Kemp and Pierce explain so well: neither the Greeks nor the Romans exist today. What we call contemporary Greeks or Romans are the product of centuries of blood mixing that devalued not only the genotype of the original Indo-European population, but their extended phenotype as well: the Greco-Roman hard ethos and their galvanizing mythos mostly reflected in the Homeric tales. The Greeks and Romans who embraced Christianity were a totally different breed of the pure Aryans of Sparta or the austere Latins of the Roman Republic (see e.g., the essays that I translated from Evropa Soberana in later chapters of this book).

MacDonald himself acknowledges on page 190 that “the Jews have continued as a creative race into the present, while the Greeks gradually merged with the barbarians and lost their distinctiveness—a point remarkably similar to Chamberlain’s ‘chaos of peoples’ in which the decline of the ancient world is attributed to loss of racial purity.” Conversely, I would say that since the Jews have conserved their genotype almost intact throughout the millennia they are able to celebrate their Maccabean revolt as if it was yesterday. In other words, had whites preserved their genes intact, some of us might still be celebrating Antiochus’ victories over the subversive tribe; or, if we knew our history with the same passion that Jews know theirs, we might still be celebrating the fall of the Temple of Jerusalem in 70 AD, or the more recent expulsion of the tribe from the Iberian peninsula.

What conventional historians ignore is that, once the Church lost its power to sell a worldview after the late 18th and early 19th centuries, our genetic individualism placed us at the mercy of a collectivist tribe.

Fortunately, the ethno-traitorous West has committed financial blunders in the 20th and 21st centuries. The dollar and all fiat currencies of the West will crash probably in this decade (I am reviewing this essay in 2014), which means that there is hope that some of us will start to understand the Jewish problem in a post-crashed world. On page 10 of SAID MacDonald says that “in congruence with the results of social identity research, anti-Semitism is expected to be most prominent among those most in competition with the Jews and during times of economic crisis.”

Although most readers of MacDonald treasure The Culture of Critique, the third and last of his trilogy on Jewry as their favorite book of this collection, I believe that MacDonald’s work should be read from the beginning. A People that Shall Dwell Alone, Separation and its Discontents and The Culture of Critique can help us, using William Pierce’s metaphor, to “see the forest” with crystal-clear vision.

Remember Pierce’s words? If we don’t try to understand the Jews we can never really understand what is happening to our race and our civilization. Professor MacDonald’s voluminous texts have done the hard work for us—both the trilogy and his webzine The Occidental Observer—in a scholarly and yet entertaining way.

Categories
Christendom Individualism Racial studies Rape of the Sabine Women Real men Vikings Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Vikings and Christianity (3)

Excerpted from the 21st article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:


The Vikings’ fighting spirit had been sapped by Christianity, but an even larger factor in their demise was their inability to keep in check their quarrels among themselves, combine their forces against outsiders, and thus match the growing power of kings in more unified lands than their own. Excessive individualism took its final toll.

Ever since the close of the Viking Age men in whose veins Viking blood still runs have dreamed of the freedom and the challenge and the glory of those bygone days. Perhaps nowhere is this better expressed than in a stanza from an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem, The Wanderer:

What has become of the steed?
What has become of the warrior?
What has become of the seats of banquet?
Where are the joys of the hall?
Oh, for the bright cup!
Oh, for the mail-clad warrior!
Oh, for the glory of the prince!
How that time has passed away
And grown dark under the cover of night,
As if it had never been.



Semites and Vikings: No Love Lost

One would expect to find a spiritual difference between a race bred a hundred generations in the marketplace, where survival depended primarily on a glib tongue and an eye for a bargain, and a race shaped by the killing winters of the North, accustomed to combat and hardship. This difference—the difference between the Jewish spirit and the White spirit—is manifested in the world around us in a thousand ways.

Perhaps nowhere has the contrast between the natural, healthy, adventurous spirit of our race and the spirit of the Jew been more sharply drawn, however, than in a couple of recent issues of the student newspaper published on the Los Angeles campus of California State College. In the first issue was printed a poem by Dr. Peter Peel, who teaches history there. The second issue contained a response to the poem from a Jew at the same college.

Here is the poem, which was titled Goetterdaemmerung:

When Spring lightly touches
With hand green and golden
The mountains and fjords,
Then shouts the sea rover,
“A-viking! A-viking!”

The hammers are busy
On weapon and harness.
Then flashes the broad blade
In every sea hamlet.
The dragon ships, thirsty
For bounding blue water,
Leap down to the seashore.

And Olaf of Norway
And Erik of Gotland
And Thorwald the Mighty,
Whose grandsire was Wotan,
Stand fast on the poop deck
With golden hair streaming,
With spear brightly glinting,
With eye fierce and blazing,
Sail out on the swan’s bath—
The grey widow-maker—
For England or Iceland,
Byzantium, Vinland,
Far land or ancient
And ripe for the plunder,
The burning of roof-trees,
The seizing of women,
The tooting of treasure,
The flowing of red blood,
And wine for the victors.

Ah, whence fled those great days,
The days of our fathers,
The days of the valiant,
Of gods and of heroes,
Or fair maids and foul dwarfs,
And lindworms and dragons,
Of Beowulf, Dietrich,
Strong Harald, grim Hagen,
Wolfhart and Siegfried,
The greathearts, the mighty?

Yea loathsome today is
The seed of their strong loins—
The petty, the small, the clod and
the crawler.

The music has gone from the souls of our people.
The thunder has vanished away with Valhalla.
Now meekness and weakness
And womanly virtues
Have shackled, degraded
And shamefully softened
The sons of our fathers,
The sons of the mighty.

And now have we traded
The lightning of storm gods,
The arms of Valkyries,
The halls of Valhalla,
The kiss of wish maidens,
For wings and a nightshirt,
A harp and a halo,
A psalmbook and psalter?
Oh, no, my Lord Bishop!

Hark, grey Galilean,
The Wolf Age is coming,
The great fimbul winter,
When all sick things perish.

A few days after this poem appeared, the following letter [by R.A. Klein] headed “Bloodthirsty Sickness,” showed up on the editorial page of the student newspaper. The poem about the Vikings in the Nov. 25 issue by Peter H. Pee had real soul and beauty—the soul and the beauty of the bloodthirsty.

Let it speak for itself. [Klein wrote:]

“With golden hair streaming, With spear brightly glinting, With eye fierce and blazing… And ripe for the plunder, The burning of roof-trees, The seizing of women, The looting of treasure, The flowing of red blood, And wine for the victors.”

Murder! rape! loot, plunder blood and wine—the wanton destruction of the productive by bloodthirsty savages. And what do these vicious predator-warriors denounce?

“Now meekness and weakness And womanly virtues Have shackled, degraded And shamefully softened The sons of our fathers, The sons of the mighty.”

Yes, how could one be more degraded in the eyes of these savages than to become like those inferior creatures called women.

Beware you women, blacks, Latins and other lesser creatures. The Blond Beast “With golden hair streaming” and warm, red blood dripping from his mighty sword shall rise again. Beware you weak and sick of all races for “The Wolf Age is coming… When all sick things perish.”

Meanwhile, I wait for the day when this bloodthirsty sickness of the Blond Beast shall perish forever from the face of the earth.

Categories
Charlemagne Christendom Individualism Racial studies Vikings Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Vikings and Christianity (1)

Excerpted from the 21st article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:


Called many names—Danes, Geats, Norsemen, Rus, Swedes, Varangers—they are best known to us by the name which is also used to characterize both the age in which they flourished and the way of life of many of them: Vikings. Like two great waves of raiders, conquerors, and colonizers before them, the Goths and the Anglo-Saxons, they came from the Nordic heartland: southern Sweden and Norway, the Danish peninsula, the adjoining portion of northern Germany, and the nearby North Sea and Baltic islands.

Essence of Whiteness

They are of special interest to us in our endeavor to understand who we are, not so much because most of us have Viking forebears (although a great many people with immediate roots in Ireland, Scotland, England, and northwestern France, as well as in Scandinavia, do), but because they give us a clearer, more detailed picture of that pure essence of Indo-Europeanism of Whiteness—which is the common heritage of all of us, whether our recent ancestors were Germans, Celts, Balts, or Slavs, than we can obtain from a study of any other European people.

German in language like the Goths and the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings retained other aspects of Germanic culture which those earlier emigrants from the Nordic heartland had already lost by the dawn of the Viking Age. In particular, the Vikings held to their Indo-European religion and worldview longer than any of the other Germanic peoples. They also remained hardier, fiercer in battle, and more venturesome than those who had been softened by the more civilized living to the south.

Best and Worst in Our Race

The Vikings not only serve us as an especially useful epitome of Whiteness at a time when our survival demands a renewal of the best of our old values and strengths, but they also provide us with a clear reminder of the danger inherent in one of our most lethal weaknesses: excessive individualism and lack of racial solidarity. A study of the Vikings acquaints us with both the best and the worst (or, in this age, the least affordable) of the characteristics of our race.

No Viking Democrats

The men who inhabited this region were necessarily self-reliant, tenacious, energetic, and resourceful. No anemic democrats these: the terrain was not suited to the placid, ant-heap mentality of lesser races to the south; it bred men with strong wills and stronger egos, a natural warrior aristocracy.

Cultural Unity

The isolation by terrain and climate of many Viking communities did not prevent the Vikings from having a remarkable unity of culture, language, and spirit but it certainly did not encourage political unity. Viking individualism seemed to be inimical to a sense of racial solidarity. While more subjective races to the south were often drawn together by the perceived need for mutual support in the face of a hostile world, Vikings were much more inclined to face the world as individuals.

Their loyalty and sense of community seldom extended beyond the fighting band to which they belonged or, at most, to that limited region of Norway or Denmark or whatever which they considered “home”. And they would as gladly—or almost as gladly—hew down the Vikings of a rival band as a monastery full of trembling priests in some southern land. Within the band, however, the Viking ethos demanded a solidarity as uncompromising as that of the other Germanic peoples of their time.

Ralph the Walker

Just as in England and Ireland, however, Vikings who at first came only to seize women and gold later came to seize land as well. This process reached its climax early in the 10th century when a Viking band wrested away from the West Franks a substantial piece of territory in northwestern France, south of the lower Seine.

First White American

A few years later another Greenland Viking, Thorfinn Karlsefni, made a determined effort to establish a permanent Viking presence in America. He fitted out three longships and recruited 160 men and women to accompany him on the westward voyage. They built a community in North America which they called Straumfjord, and in 1004 Thorfinn’s wife Gudrid bore him a son, Snorri, there: the first native White American.

Unrelenting attacks by Indians made life very difficult for Thorfinn’s American colonists, however, and after three years they abandoned their settlement and returned to Greenland.

Had the Vikings’ weapons been technologically superior to the bows and arrows of the [Amerinds]—as Columbus’ firearms were—then White history in America would have begun 500 years sooner than it did. As it was, the individual superiority of the Viking warriors in battle could not make up for the enormous numerical advantage enjoyed by the hordes of Red men who opposed them.

Purest Cultural Heritage

Today these North Atlantic islands, of which Iceland with its quarter-million inhabitants is the most significant, preserve the Viking cultural heritage in its purest form. The modern Icelandic and Faroese languages are nearly identical to the Old Norse spoken by the Vikings, while English and the other Germanic languages have undergone great changes during the last 1,000 years. In folkways as well, many Viking traits have been preserved in the islands, especially in Iceland and the Faroes. There has even been a return to the Viking religion by some Icelanders in recent years.

No Minorities

Iceland is outstanding in another respect as well: alone among the White nations of the world it does not bear the curse of non-White minorities; it has no Blacks, no Jews, no Vietnamese, no Mexicans. Iceland has not been invaded for the last 1,000 years, except during the Second World War, when the country was occupied by American troops. The bulk of the foreigners withdrew after the war, and Icelanders insisted that future U.S. troops sent to man the air base which the United States was allowed to maintain on the island include no non-Whites.

The greatest debt that the White race owes to Icelanders is for their preservation of the Norse literary heritage: the Viking sagas. While church officials in other European countries were rounding up and burning all the pre-Christian books they could lay their hands on during the Middle Ages, Icelandic scholars were busy writing down the sagas which still existed only in oral form and transcribing, annotating, and expanding those which had been put into writing earlier.

Genocidal Evangelism

Beginning in 772, a year after he became sole king of the Franks upon the death of his brother Carloman, Karl, later known to the French as Charlemagne, son of Pepin the Short and grandson of Karl the Hammer, waged a 32-year campaign of genocidal evangelism against the Saxons. The campaign began with Karl’s destruction of the Irminsul, or World Pillar, the Saxon equivalent of the Norse World Ash, Yggdrasil, located in the Saxons’ most sacred grove, at Eresburg (on the site of the present Marburg), and it became bloodier, crueler, and more intolerant as it wore on.

In 774, at Quierzy, Karl issued a proclamation that he would kill every Saxon who refused to accept the sweet yoke of Jesus. Henceforth a contingent of Christian priests accompanied the Frankish army on its expeditions against the Saxons, and in every Saxon village those who refused to be baptized by the priests were slaughtered on the spot.

Categories
Autobiography Christendom Individualism Judeo-reductionism Liberalism Miscegenation

My latest comments at CC

Lew,

Perhaps it’s time to make a personal confession.

Since I awakened on the JQ [Jewish Question] in 2010 a question had tormented me: to assign—intuitively of course—percentages of blame on JQ vs. other factors.

After much inner struggling I discovered that it all depended on the sources I was reading. If I happened to be eating too many Jews for breakfast, it looked indeed like the JQ constituted 90% of the etiology of our current mess or more (I myself was a sort of “monocausalist”). Surprisingly, when following next I reread intriguing discussions like this one it became apparent that Christianity and its liberal offshoots were the damned ninety percent.

I simply could not make my mind… Throughout 2010 and 2011 my inner life looked like sine/cosine graphs alternating Monday, Wednesday and Friday believing that Jews were the main factor while changing my mind on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday below the “x” axis of the graph. Again, I realized all had to do with the chosen sources and with the subsequent confirmation bias.

Everything started to change by the end of the last year after digesting the implications of Michael O’Meara’s “White Nationalism is Not Anti-Semitism”.

O’Meara’s claim that, if financially sponsored like KMD [Kevin MacDonald], he could demonstrate that the West’s darkest hour had to do more with capitalism, Protestantism and Catholicism (among other factors) than to Jewry started to make sense in my soliloquies only after I posted a couple of entries about how the Spaniards’ lust for gold (and sex), together with the crazy approval of the Pope to marry Indian girls, caused the horrible mestization that I see every time I step outside my home.

Thinking about what happened in New Spain (not to be confused with “Mexico”) provoked a change in my worldview, and gradually the sine/cosine alternations ceased, to my relief.



Spanish-English translation of the painting’s footnote: “A male Spaniard and an Indian woman produce a Mestizo”


This does not mean that my present point of view is necessarily right. I am still learning. However, for the moment I believe that my “catalyst” metaphor accurately depicts the Jewish Problem.

Jewish subversive activities are a strong chemical, granted; but like O’Meara I believe that it is not the main ingredient of the witches’ formula. Some of KMD’s papers on how whites have some unique hardware characteristics such as individualism, abstract idealism and universal moralism, together with the software that I call the Christian / Secular Christian problem (liberalism run amok after the Revolution), constitute, to my mind, the main ingredients of the brew that’s killing us. (I think that Wallace is doing a good job illustrating it in the case of the US, what he calls the “Yankee Question”.)

But as I said, I’m still open to new ideas, just as I was open when O’Meara’s short piece made an impact on my previous thought.

P.S. of August 15th:

@ Lew,

The importance of clear definition as a tool for clarity…

For more that two years Hunter Wallace (and sometimes Guessedworker) have been using the term “single Jewish cause” in their blogs. As to racial preservation, you can define it as those who believe that there is essentially a single cause for the West’s darkest hour, but it has been something so obvious at MR and OD that a formal, dictionary-like definition has been deemed unnecessary there.

…won’t be able to sustain the position that monocausalism is a dominant view in WNism.

I think it’s pretty dominant. Besides Revilo Oliver and me who among white nationalists blame more Christianity than Judaism? Who besides O’Meara and a few others blame more a capitalism run amok or even, before the rise of capitalism, “economics over race” policies (again, cf. Arthur Kemp’s book)?

Above I talked about the “witches brew”. While in my blog I’ve added quite a few entries about how Christianity is a megalodon compared to Judaism (in the sense of a far larger predator of whites), the meaning of my metaphor is that even the history Christianity, which is a huge subject, is not enough to understand the brew’ formula. O’Meara for one has published here some intriguing articles purporting to demonstrate the havoc that corporate capitalism has caused for the white race. And again, if you study why whites disappeared in the Middle East, India, Egypt and later mongrelized themselves in Greece, Rome and throughout the American continent at the south of Río Grande after conquering all of these lands—sans Jews—, you start getting the big picture.

The criticisms of Christianity recorded in my blog are not original. It’s a collection of articles from other authors. If we add to these factors the Jewish Problem and my truly original contribution to the field (my interpretation of Psychohistory as to why some whites hate their race), my “brew” metaphor starts making sense: The etiology of Western malaise is extremely complex indeed, with several exotic ingredients—not just one—that must be deciphered, one by one. Any theorist who picked one of the above-mentioned ingredients and claimed that it’s the single element of the brew would be a “monocausalist” (e.g., if I claimed that my book on Psychohistory explained it all I would be a monocausalist).

Don’t quibble over definitions, Lew. The term “monocausalism” is well known even in the academia. Edward Gibbon has been criticized by later historians precisely for being a “monocausalist”: claiming that the rise of Christianity was the main factor of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

Get in touch with [X, Y and Z nationalists]… I said I’m not a monocausalist… Tanstaafl explicitly says he’s not a monocausalist.

Are you kidding me?

Let’s suppose for a second that you are not one.

Are you ready to acknowledge that the whites’ hardware according to some of KMD’s papers (abstract idealism + individualism + universalism + altruistic punishments) in addition to whites’ cultural software (Christianity + its liberal offshoots + economics over race policies) all together constitute the major ingredients of the formula that’s killing us, and that Jewry merely catalyzes such process?

(Btw, you didn’t read my above link of what Franklin Ryckaert said about my exchange with Tanstaafl, did you?)

♣

Original source: here

Categories
Alexander the Great Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Axiology Christendom Individualism Liberalism Miscegenation Universalism

White suicide since Alexander

A comment by Franklin Ryckaert:

It would be nice if a person with the talent of a Prof. MacDonald would write a trilogy on the problem dealing with:

1) The innate psychological characteristics of Whites (individualism, abstract idealism, universal moralism).

2) The influence of Christianity and its secular outgrowth of Liberalism (inversion of values, altruism as the only form of moralism even to a suicidal degree).

3) The Jewish exploitation of both.

Central to the weakness of Whites is what I call naive inclusivism.

It is naive because it not only believes that all non-white peoples can and want to become like Westerners, but also that including them in Western societies will lead to a Utopia instead of racial suicide.

This naive inclusivism is as old as the European expansion outside Europe itself:

• Alexander the Great wanted to include all peoples of the Middle East in his Hellenistic ideal, even initiating miscegenation with them.

• The Romans included all non-European peoples in their Empire bequeathing Roman citizenship to all who they thought deserved it. They even had one time an Arab emperor (Philippus Arabs).

• When the Western European peoples began to colonize the world, they made the same mistake. The Spaniards and Portuguese miscegenated with the natives of their colonies on a mass scale and later also with their imported African slaves.

• The Dutch miscegenated with the Indonesians and accepted their mixed offspring as “Europeans”.

• The French accepted educated Blacks, the so-called evolués, as their equals. France doesn’t keep statistics about its ethnic and racial minorities because it considers them all as “Frenchmen”.

• Only the British kept aloof from the natives in their colonies and didn’t allow them to immigrate into the white settlement colonies or Britain itself. But that has now radically changed, the British having become the most extreme both in terms of immigration and miscegenation.

We simply cannot ascribe this suicidal behaviour to Jewish machinations, rather it is the age-old inclination of Europeans to include the whole world in a universal ideal. You aptly describe Jewish destructive influence as an “epiphenomenon”; it couldn’t function as it does without the above-described preconditions.

Tanstaafl and Carolyn Yaeger refuse to acknowledge this basic fact, ascribing its recognition to “treason”. Self-criticism hurts, but it is absolutely necessary.

Categories
American civil war Christendom Egalitarianism Enlightenment French Revolution Individualism Kevin MacDonald Liberalism Psychology Slavery

Our loose screw

That Whites have got a loose screw is patent even in the writing of the foremost expert on how the Jews are capitalizing on it. In an article at his webzine, The Occidental Observer, Kevin MacDonald put it in simple terms:

My view is that moral universalism and guilt are aspects of individualism as an ethnic trait of Europeans (see here, p. 23ff). These traits are profoundly maladaptive in the modern world where they have been used as swords by the historic enemies of Europeans and their civilization. European individualist culture creates morally defined ingroups rather than ingroups based on kinship, with high levels of altruistic punishment against violators. The Puritan-Yankee culture that was so influential in shaping America is a prominent example, as in the movement to abolish slavery in the 19th century and the Civil Rights movement in the 20th century. These morally defined ingroups function to prevent defection in societies not based on biological relatedness. Guilt then functions as a negative emotion motivating people to adhere to group norms. The success of the culture of the Holocaust in manufacturing guilt is testimony to the continuing success of this strategy.

The strategy of Jewish intellectual movements for destroying Europeans and their culture has been to convince the Europeans of their own moral bankruptcy. Jewish intellectual movements have presented Judaism as morally superior to European civilization and European civilization as morally bankrupt and the proper target of altruistic punishment. The consequence is that once Europeans are convinced of their own moral depravity, they will destroy their own people in a fit of altruistic punishment.

More technically, at The Occidental Quarterly (TOQ), the academic journal for white studies, Prof. MacDonald approaches the same subject in more abstract terms (e.g., “the free-rider problem,” “altruistic punishment,” etc.) that require previous knowledge from the reader about esoteric fields of inquiry such as evolutionary psychology among humans.

In an article published last year at TOQ MacDonald wrote:

It is noteworthy that the French Revolution had pronounced egalitarian, anti-aristocratic trends, often couched in the language of moral ingroups and outgroups in opposition to the aristocracy. For example, the moral condemnation of social hierarchy by the Jacobin radicals during the French Revolution is a major theme of Lothrop Stoddard’s The French Revolution in San Domingo. Thus Stoddard notes the hatred toward the White slave-owning colonists. During the height of the Reign of Terror, colonists sent home to France were greeted, in the words of one such unfortunate, with “a furious hatred… A hatred so intense that our most terrible misfortunes did not excite the slightest commiseration.” At the same time, mulatto and Black delegates from San Domingo were greeted with delirious applause.

Such sentiments recall the moral fervor of the Puritan-descended Yankee abolitionists in the period prior to the American Civil War. For example, for Orestes Brownson (1803–1876), a prominent publicist and activist, the Civil War was a moral crusade waged not only to preserve the union, but to emancipate the slaves. He argued “for the unity of races and the inherent dignity of each person, and he lambasted Southerners for trying to enlarge their political base” by adding to the number of slave states. Writing in 1840, Brownson claimed that we should “realize in our social arrangements and in the actual conditions of all men that equality of man and man” that God had established but which had been destroyed by capitalism. According to Brownson, Christians had to

bring down the high, and bring up the low; to break the fetters of the bound and set the captive free; to destroy all oppression, establish the reign of justice, which is the reign of equality, between man and man; to introduce new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness, wherein all shall be as brothers, loving one another, and no one possessing what another lacketh.

It’s interesting that whereas the aristocratic-egalitarian military groups emphasized by Duchesne produced cohesion and loyalty as a result of fealty to a successful leader (rather than on the basis of kinship), the East Anglian model for cohesion was the creation of moral and ideological bases of group cohesion (rather than on the basis of kinship). These two models are thus variants on the individualist theme. The Puritans famously imposed penalties on people who departed from the moral/ideological strictures of the society. They were also willing to incur great costs to impose their moral/ideological version of truth. Puritan “ordered liberty” was the freedom to act within the confines of the moral order. This might be called the paradox of individualism: In order to form cohesive groups, individualists have at times erected strong social controls on individual behavior that result in group cohesion.

The logic connecting these tendencies to the individualist hunter-gather model is obvious: Like all humans in a dangerous and difficult world, hunter-gatherers need to develop cohesive, cooperative in-groups. But rather than base them on known kinship relations, the prototypical egalitarian-individualist groups of the West are based on reputation and trust. Egalitarian-individualists create moral-ideological communities in which those who violate public trust and other manifestations of the moral order are shunned, ostracized, and exposed to public humiliation—a fate that would have resulted in evolutionary death during the harsh ecological period of the Ice Age—, the same fate as the derelict father who refused to provision his children.

A possible evolutionary legacy of this phenomenon is a greater tendency to engage in what social scientists term “altruistic punishment,” defined as punishment of people who depart from the moral-ideological consensus that costs the punisher. A cooperative culture derived from European hunter-gathers would be expected to be characterized by high levels of altruistic punishment directed at free-riders. This is studied in a game among strangers who donate to a common pot that is increased by a set multiplier by the experimenter and then divided equally. Free riders contribute little but get all the benefits. Altruistic punishers incur costs to punish the cheaters. This punishment is motivated by moral outrage. Because it is played among strangers, the game mimics individualistic societies.  Whatever the political and economic complexities that led to the Civil War, it was the Yankee moral condemnation of slavery that inspired and justified the massive carnage of closely related Anglo Americans on behalf of slaves from Africa. Militarily, the war with the Confederacy was the greatest sacrifice in lives and property ever made by Americans.

The Puritans tended to pursue utopian causes framed as moral issues, not hesitating to endure high costs in order to punish those who violated the moral norms of the ingroup. They were prone to utopian appeals to a “higher law” and the belief that government’s principal purpose is moral. New England was the most fertile ground for “the perfectability of man creed,” and the “father of a dozen ‘isms’.” It goes without saying that all of the great European wars of the 20th century have been rationalized in moral terms—to secure the Enlightenment ideals of freedom, democracy, and individual rights against the state.

To conclude, my proposal is that the culture of the West as it developed in the modern era owes much more to egalitarian individualism than to aristocratic individualism. It’s interesting that all of the intellectual movements discussed in The Culture of Critique involved moral indictments of the West and its history of slavery, segregation, colonialism, anti-Semitism, exclusion of Jews from the Protestant elite. Clearly the most egregious of these moral failings stem from the cultural strand of aristocratic egalitarianism, not the egalitarian individualism that eventually won out.

Nevertheless, these movements have managed to create a moral community that taps into the hunter-gatherer ethic of egalitarian individualism. As noted above, Duchesne attributes the decline of aristocratic individualism partly to “the ethical demands of modern democratic liberalism.” However, the psychological power of the ethical demands of modern liberalism themselves require explanation. The argument here is that the roots of the creation of a moral-ideological ingroup stem from the unique egalitarian-individualist strand of the culture of the West.

The general dismantling of the culture of the West, and eventually its demise as anything resembling an ethnic entity, is occurring as a result of a moral onslaught triggering a paroxysm of altruistic punishment and based ultimately on these evolved tendencies.

MacDonald’s long piece can be read here.